Veal in Vermouth

[david-hibling]

I love cooking with alcohol and sometimes I put it in the food!!!!!! Seriously if you add wine etc to a dish remember the cooking burns off the alcohol so you are just left with the great flavour! Here is a simple but tasty supper dish which is not too time consuming so can be cooked for your guests without you leaving the table too long missing the gossip being stuck for ever in the kitchen !

SERVES 4 You will need 4 escalopes of veal, 2 oz of butter, a very large glass of dry white vermouth, 4 tablespoons of double (heavy?) cream or creme fraiche, 1 tablespoon cranberry jelly.

Toss the veal in seasoned flour (pepper salt and herbs of your liking) Melt the butter in a large frying pan - fry the veal - veal escalopes do not take long to cook about 5 mins either side to get them brown and cooked. Remove veal and place on a warmed dish, cover and keep warm. Add the vermouth to the butter and meat juices and stir in the cranberry jelly - boil rapidly to thicken - when the sauce has thickened add the cream and mix well pour over the veal and serve.

I accompany this meal with a crisp green salad and roast potatoes - try adding a sliver or two of garlic into the oil that you roast the potatoes in to give them extra flavour. I always par-boil potatoes before I roast them i.e. I heat the oil in the roasting pan in the oven meanwhile I bring the potatoes to the boil in a saucepan boil for a few minutes then drain return them to the saucepan and shake thoroughly before carefully tipping them into the roasting pan and oven roast.

[hwc]

That's an interesting variation on the basic veal marsala technique. I try to keep a bottle of dry Italian Marsala wine on the shelf for cooking (can't stand "cooking wines"). Same exact recipe you describe, only deglaze the sautee pan with Marsala wine instead of vermouth. It's a fifteen minute dish, start to finish. A nice variation is to sautee some mushrooms in a separate pan and add them into the Marsala sauce. The only problem is that our grocery store veal medallions are crappy. Tough shoulder meat. Still tasty, though.

I thought of you the other day. We have been cleaning out the freezer after a three day power failure, using up stuff that was salvageable, tossing all the stuff that might kill us. We ended up with an empty freezer. First thing I knew I needed was some frozen homemade chicken stock. Of course, that means roast chicken for a nice meaty carcass to go into the stock. And, that means Marcella Hazen's Italian roast chicken. Couldn't stuff it (the bits of stuffing wouldn't do so well in the stock), so just garlic cloves, fresh rosemary, some celery, and salt and pepper inside the bird. Boy was it good. Two dinners for the wife and I from the roast chicken and four quarts of chicken stock frozen in 2 cup and 4 cup containers.

Gotta replenish the shrimp/fish stock next.

Our salvaging spree also resulted in the best vegetable soup I've ever eaten. Found about a pound of tenderloin steak that has partially thawed and refrozen. Knew they wouldn't be that good as steaks, but were safe to eat. Perfect for a soup. Also had several bags of frozen veggies that needed to be cleared out. Went to one of my favorite cookbooks: Paul Prudhomme's Seasoned America. It's a collection of regional signature dishes (many soups and stews) from all corners of the United States (i.e. New England clam chowder). He had a killer vegetable beef soup recipe that I loosely followed, basically emptying everything I could find into a large Le Creuset dutch oven, some browned and sauteed to start, some added early to cook for several hours, some added late to stay crispy.

[david-hibling]

Aint nothing to beat good ol home cooking whilst I enjoy trying out new recipies for dinner parties the best are the trusted old cooking skills from my Grandma - especially in winter stews pies and casseroles!!!!

[david-hibling]

Wow soup sounds great - I love making home made soups with left overs some are okay and some are to die for - alas the heavenly ones you can never quite repeat as you never seem to have exactly the same leftovers!!!!

[barbara42]

i know thati am old enough to be a good cook, but the truth is, i just love to try the receipi,s that David and Hwc have, to me they are exotic, i am from just plain old southern home cooking

[hwc]

barbara:

My crowning achievement in cooking was perfecting my grandmother's fried chicken. It's probably the most difficult dish I've ever tried to cook. So simple. Just dredge it in flour and pan fry it, but it took dozens of tries to get the heat and timing just right so it's golden brown, crispy, cooked, and not burned.

She cooked it every Sunday for 200 people as part of the menu at her once-a-week smorgasboard restaurant on her farm. I grew up loving that fried chicken and it was really special to learn how to cook it.

It's funny. I've since tried some fried chicken recipes from big name chefs who clearly have no earthly idea how to fry chicken. I remember one massive disaster from PBS's Ming Tsai -- a well known fusian Asian chef. I can't remember, he had some kind of panko bread crumb breading, deep fried like Pork Tonkatsu. Complete disaster. The breading burned black before the chicken was cooked. I later saw a little footnote on the printed version of his recipe suggesting that in the test kitchen, they taken the chicken out of the fryer and baked it in the oven 'til it was done! They just didn't show that part on TV! Clearly, they had encountered the same fundamental flaw in the recipe as I had.

[barbara42]

you know, that is the one thing that i really do well is fry chicken. it is like you say, the trick is getting the grease at the right temp, so the chicken will be done on the inside and golden brown on the out side. i tell you, the next time i fry chicken i am going to test the grease temp, and exactly how long it takes to brown on one side befor i turn it over, get some statistics and i will put it on here. right now all i know on frying chicken is by what my dad taught me, he was a cook in the army and it was by doing, no recipe. i bet your Grandmother,s and my Dads were close to the same

[hwc]

Timing and grease temp won't help. It's all tied to a particular stove and a particular fry pan. The trial and error part is figuring out what heat setting your burner is just right.

I do make one major change in my grandmother's recipe. She, of course, used lard for all her frying. For most of her life, lard rendered from her own pigs raised on her own farm. I don't have any pigs and lard is so politically incorrect that I am forced to fry my chicken in canola oil.

[barbara42]

i know, my father used lard, i use caola oil also, and i use a cast iron fry pan, that is all i have ever used to fry chicken, but i only have an electic stove, my father used gas, but it turnes out the same so far. i do use the burner on high med. to brown the chicken and turn the temp down to med.low and put a cover on it to get the inside done, you can just tell when to turn it over and do the same to the other side, when it is done, i then make a gravy with the drippings

[hwc]

Wow soup sounds great - I love making home made soups with left overs some are okay and some are to die for - alas the heavenly ones you can never quite repeat as you never seem to have exactly the same leftovers!!!!

One of our family favs is a Julia Child/Jacques Pepin recipe for Mediterranean Seafood Stew. Basically a base of sauted onions, celery, and carrots, white wine, fish stock, tarragon, and a ton of saffron. Then, cook whatever seafood looks good in it. Small fresh clams in the shell, white fish, shrimp, scallops, whatever. It turns out different everytime I make it. Sometimes I use fish stock. Sometimes that bottled oyster water. Different kinds of seafood. Different amounts of tomato. Different veggies. It's always good, though!

I finally figured out that the fun of stews and soups is that no two are ever the same. I mean, who is going to measure out 2 cups of onions? You dice the number of onions that's close, but it may be more or less. Same with canned Italian plum tomatoes. I mean, I don't throw away part of the can if I've got a little more than the recipe calls for and a big soup pot!